“What I Didn’t Find in Africa” 12 Years Later
by Jon Krampner
As the news anchor in the early days of “Saturday Night Live,” Chevy Chase cheerfully reminded us every week that the late Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco was still dead. In the same spirit, 12 years after Dick Cheney and George W. Bush drove the U.S. into a war against Iraq based on lies, I’m here to remind you that Iraq still has no weapons of mass destruction.
Yes, I’m a day late and a dollar short. (Unlike the U.S., which is 12 years later and more than $800 billion dollars short as a result of the Iraq War.) But not everyone was. Among those urging caution in early 2003 was former U.S. ambassador to Gabon and Sao Tome and Principe Joseph C. Wilson IV. On July 6, 2003, he helped The New York Times atone for its shameful Judith Miller-driven reporting on Iraq by writing the op-ed piece “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”
It gave the lie to the 16 words in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Hussein hadn’t sought them, he didn’t have them, and the Bushies knew it. Wilson’s memorable op-ed began with what could be called the 57 words:
“Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?
“Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”
Diplomatic in tone, the words were transgressive in spirit: Wilson was the first major establishment insider to say publically that Bush and Cheney and company had lied us into war.
And he would know. During the 1990-91 Gulf War, he served heroically as deputy chief of mission in Baghdad. He began his diplomatic career at the U.S. embassy to Niger, and was sent back to Niger by the Bush-Cheney administration in February 2002 to run down spurious stories about Saddam Hussein re-constituting his “weapons of mass destruction.” (WMD’s is itself a weasel term, conflating nuclear weapons with horrible but less-destructive arms such as chemical weapons.)
Wilson went there, talked to major players in the government and uranium industry and concluded, as others before him had, that there was no there there. So he was predictably outraged when Bush administration officials claimed otherwise.
But he didn’t just get outraged. He did something. That something was “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”
Bush, Cheney and their henchpeople were quick to retaliate. A little more than a week after the publication of Wilson’s op-ed, right-wing hatchetman Robert Novak published the first of two columns blowing the cover of Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA agent. Doing this sort of thing is ordinarily a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act – unless you have friends in high places.
Bush and Cheney were making a point: you cross us and this is what happens to you. And your wife.
It is a staple of modern Republican philosophy that government doesn’t work. But in this case, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Plamegate resulted in the U.S. government losing two bright, courageous and highly principled public servants, Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame Wilson.
After undergoing the severe turbulence that can be expected when the U.S. government is on a vendetta against you, Wilson and Plame had a soft landing: they and their marriage are intact, and they are enjoying their post-government lives. George W. Bush, who presided over the effort to destroy the Wilsons, hasn’t fared as well: His reputation is so tarnished that none of the dozen or so candidates piling into the clown car for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination are willing to defend him and his splendid little war, not even his brother, who, as governor of Florida in 2000, stole the presidency for him.
The guarantors of our freedom are not necessarily the soldiers we send overseas, but public servants like Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson who capably and courageously serve our country, sometimes at great cost to themselves. They deserve our enduring thanks.
Krampner is the author of the 9,000-word e-book, “Joe Wilson: What He Didn’t Find in Africa,” which will be available on Smashwords July 6, the 12th anniversary of Wilson’s op-ed.
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by Jon Krampner
As the news anchor in the early days of “Saturday Night Live,” Chevy Chase cheerfully reminded us every week that the late Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco was still dead. In the same spirit, 12 years after Dick Cheney and George W. Bush drove the U.S. into a war against Iraq based on lies, I’m here to remind you that Iraq still has no weapons of mass destruction.
Yes, I’m a day late and a dollar short. (Unlike the U.S., which is 12 years later and more than $800 billion dollars short as a result of the Iraq War.) But not everyone was. Among those urging caution in early 2003 was former U.S. ambassador to Gabon and Sao Tome and Principe Joseph C. Wilson IV. On July 6, 2003, he helped The New York Times atone for its shameful Judith Miller-driven reporting on Iraq by writing the op-ed piece “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”
It gave the lie to the 16 words in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Hussein hadn’t sought them, he didn’t have them, and the Bushies knew it. Wilson’s memorable op-ed began with what could be called the 57 words:
“Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?
“Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”
Diplomatic in tone, the words were transgressive in spirit: Wilson was the first major establishment insider to say publically that Bush and Cheney and company had lied us into war.
And he would know. During the 1990-91 Gulf War, he served heroically as deputy chief of mission in Baghdad. He began his diplomatic career at the U.S. embassy to Niger, and was sent back to Niger by the Bush-Cheney administration in February 2002 to run down spurious stories about Saddam Hussein re-constituting his “weapons of mass destruction.” (WMD’s is itself a weasel term, conflating nuclear weapons with horrible but less-destructive arms such as chemical weapons.)
Wilson went there, talked to major players in the government and uranium industry and concluded, as others before him had, that there was no there there. So he was predictably outraged when Bush administration officials claimed otherwise.
But he didn’t just get outraged. He did something. That something was “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”
Bush, Cheney and their henchpeople were quick to retaliate. A little more than a week after the publication of Wilson’s op-ed, right-wing hatchetman Robert Novak published the first of two columns blowing the cover of Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA agent. Doing this sort of thing is ordinarily a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act – unless you have friends in high places.
Bush and Cheney were making a point: you cross us and this is what happens to you. And your wife.
It is a staple of modern Republican philosophy that government doesn’t work. But in this case, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Plamegate resulted in the U.S. government losing two bright, courageous and highly principled public servants, Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame Wilson.
After undergoing the severe turbulence that can be expected when the U.S. government is on a vendetta against you, Wilson and Plame had a soft landing: they and their marriage are intact, and they are enjoying their post-government lives. George W. Bush, who presided over the effort to destroy the Wilsons, hasn’t fared as well: His reputation is so tarnished that none of the dozen or so candidates piling into the clown car for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination are willing to defend him and his splendid little war, not even his brother, who, as governor of Florida in 2000, stole the presidency for him.
The guarantors of our freedom are not necessarily the soldiers we send overseas, but public servants like Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson who capably and courageously serve our country, sometimes at great cost to themselves. They deserve our enduring thanks.
Krampner is the author of the 9,000-word e-book, “Joe Wilson: What He Didn’t Find in Africa,” which will be available on Smashwords July 6, the 12th anniversary of Wilson’s op-ed.
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